So, I got an allotment. What, I didn’t tell you? OK, well the thing about allotments is that they are a lot of work, and you get your hands mucky, neither of which is very conducive to writing blog posts. But in any event, here it is, in all its recently manured glory.

Now, I learned a few things about the biochemistry of plants when I was at University – sadly I can’t remember much of it now. But that’s OK, because undergraduate plant science is nigh on useless for any practical applications (ie actually growing stuff). What you quickly learn is that for allotment gardening, since you are trying to grow quite a lot on a fairly small plot, soil fertility is really important.

What’s amusing about putting manure on an allotment is that you’re basically mixing large quantities of old horse faecal matter into the soil in which you’ll (hopefully) grow lots of food. On the face of it that sounds like an odd thing to do, but considering that everything that is harvested from an allotment reduces the nutrient content of the soil, it needs to be replenished. As an added benefit, the vegetable matter (aka digested grass, and the sawdust the stables used, both well rotted) helps the soil to retain moisture, and provide food for worms. The worms aerate the soil (by eating it, basically) and improve its crumb structure.

What does need to be remembered is that the same processes that incorporate organic matter into the soil in an allotment are the same processes that have been recycling organic matter for billions of years on earth. So putting manure on an allotment is just making use of a lot of conveniently evolved soil bacteria and invertebrates to help you grow bigger potatoes.

So having convinced myself on a scientific level that I wanted to mix horse poo into the growing medium for my food, I set about moving it, with a wheelbarrow, and a shovel. When you move a wheelbarrow worth of manure, it seems like a lot, right up to the point that you dump it on one of the beds. At this point it appears to dramatically reduce in volume, and you realise that “10 or so barrow loads” just isn’t going to cut it.

So about 25 barrow loads later, I appeared to have a very serious mole infestation! Another 15 minutes and it’s all spread out over the beds, under the fruit bushes, and around the newly planted raspberries. Oh, and my hands, arms and back are telling me that I really need to stop now.

So what next? Soon we get to start planting things – potatoes, onions and shallots and garlic directly into the beds, and everything else from seed at home. Until next time….

There is an awful lot of fuss being made of this article in the Independent, about the discovery that if you have enough energy, you can get chemical reactions to happen that would not, in ordinary circumstances, do so.

It’s been a long time since my undergraduate thermodynamics classes, so I’m not going to be able to prove this with calculus, but the idea we are suddenly going to be running significant numbers of cars (or indeed, lawnmowers or anything else) on the end results of this process seem fanciful.

To get a sense of why this is, first let’s understand what’s going on here, using a bit of GSCE-level chemistry. Ironically, the handy way my chemistry teacher taught me to remember this is OIL-RIG – Oxidation Is Loss – Reduction Is Gain (of electrons). By converting CO2 and hydrogen into an alkane, the reactor built by the Air Fuel Synthesis folks has reduced the carbon, stripping joining a number of the carbon atoms together along with a number of hydrogen atoms. Pushing these atoms together and adding electrons takes energy, which is stored in the chemical bonds of the resulting compound.

Now this is essentially the exact same process that plants perform when photosynthesising – absorbing CO2 and water, and producing a reduced form of carbon (in the case of photosysthesis, the initial product is usually beta-glucose). The ability of the molecular apparatus that exists in every plant to do this is incredible, and is the root (no pun intended) of all life on Earth – without plants to capture the sun’s energy and use it to reduce carbon, no other forms of life would be able to exist.

So what has this got to do with recent events in Stockton-on-Tees? Well, the fossil fuels we’ve been using for the last few hundred years are the accumulated result of many millions of years worth of primary productivity ie, plants using the Sun to reduce carbon, which is then “fixed” in solid form in the plants tissues. These become buried in the Earth’s crust, and transformed over millions of years by heat and pressure into the fuels we use today. Think about that for a moment – humanity has been able to use millions of years of what amounts to stored sunlight, in a few hundred years.

The amount of energy this represents, in daily consumption of petrol and diesel, fuel oil, aviation fuel, natural gas and coal, is enormous. “But wait a moment”, I hear you cry, “there’s loads of energy around, what about all the wind and waves and sunlight?”. Well, you’re quite right – there is a lot of energy about, but the thing about the wind and the waves is that it is diffuse energy – it is dilute, if you like. It can be harnessed to do useful work, but not in the same way as the tremendously concentrated energy represented by fossil fuels. The best way to do this is to avoid changing the “type” of energy you’re collecting – ie if you want to warm something, use sunlight. If you want to turn something, use moving wind or water. You’ll note this is how our ancestors used energy that was available to them – ships and windmills moved with the wind, grain dried in the sun, and so on.

In order to get from diffuse energy, like wind or waves, or sunlight, to concentrated energy, you have to build large apparatus to collect enough of it, and you have to accept the losses that are incurred when changing energy from one form to another (typically we try to get to high voltage electricity).

Modern civilisation is very dependent on this kind of highly concentrated energy – and we use so much of it, that there’s no way we can replace it with any sort of “renewable” alternative, just as someone born with a multi-billion pound trust fund cannot sustain the same lifestyle by working at an ordinary job.

Now to construct the next step in the argument, we need to consider some thermodynamics, specifically the First Law of Thermodynamics, which tells us that you cannot create or destroy energy. This being the case, the energy contained in the fuel from this new process cannot contain more energy than was put into making it. And because changing energy from one form into another incurs losses, it will almost certainly contain less.

So the amount of fuel you could derive from such a process is limited by the amount of energy you can put into it. As we’ve already discussed, concentrated energy, like high voltage electricity, is only available in any significant quantity by using fossil fuels to generate it. We could hook up a larger version of the reactor to a wind farm, but we’d be unlikely to generate enough fuel to run more than a handful of vehicles, never mind the millions of cars we have in the UK. And this is assuming we didn’t want to use that electricity for anything else!

So this is not to say that this sort of process could never be useful for anything – there may be circumstances where the ability to generate a small quantity of liquid fuel, given a source of electricity, could be enormously useful. But to pretend that we could generate such fuels in comparable quantities to that in which we use petroleum today, when we have no credible candidate for a source of energy to drive this process, seems to me to be, as they say in Yorkshire, just plain daft.

EDIT 20/10/2012: Minor corrections made to which way the electrons go during reduction :O)

So lots of people in the public sector are pretty hacked off at being told their pensions are not going to be as good as they previously thought.

This is an entirely understandable attitude, although it’s not as if this is something that people in the private sector haven’t also had to confront.

What confuses me is that to any actuary worth his or her salt, it must have been blindingly obvious decades ago that we would get to this point. The demographic shift that has been exacerbated by the ‘baby boomers’ retiring can hardly have taken anyone by surprise.

So with more people taking out of the pot, and fewer people paying in, there would come a time when pension arrangements agreed in different times became unaffordable.

It’s no consolation to anyone getting the bad news, but I’d love it if the government, just for once, could try to be honest with us and admit that this should have been addressed a long time ago.

At least if they did that I could have flying bacon sandwiches for lunch.

So there’s a gazillion blogs on the web, so many that they have their own collective noun.

Why bother?

Some people write about issues that matter to them, some on behalf of their employer or some other organisation that they are involved with. Some do it for payment, some for fun, and some because it’s something they read about and thought they ought to have a go at.

It’s an odd thing really, because depending on the individual and their audience, it’s somewhere between a diary, a confessional, an advert, a sermon, or chatting down the pub.

I’m doing it because*

writing things down can be a powerful way of organising your thoughts, or just letting off steam

doing it in a way that others can respond and question stops it being a case of just yammering on to yourself

I’ve got far too much free time on my hands at the moment

*One of these reasons isn’t true. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to guess which one

So this is my first post on my ‘web log’, interestingly* enough on my birthday, which seemed like as good a day as any to start something like this.

I don’t have any intention of updating this especially regularly, I just needed something to replace the awful pages that were up here from about 2004. I imagine Google has a copy if you’re that bothered.